Top Ten Tuesday Freebie

The Top Ten Tuesday topic at The Broke and the Bookish that Jamie chose was:

This week was scheduled to be Top Ten Authors I'd Like To See On A Reality Show but I got a lot of feedback about how HARD it was...so maybe not as good as an idea as I initally thought! SO..I opened it up as a Freebie Week but I decided to stick with the topic!  

I'm opting for a freebie week topic...especially since I don't have TV and don't watch reality shows...so I chose:

 top ten book characters that remind me of someone I know in reality :)

1) My eldest daughter - Skeeter from The Help - she is a writer and she has the courage to take the side of what is right weather or not is the side of what is expected or popular. She is planning on becoming a lawyer.

2) My youngest daughter - Hermione from Harry Potter -  She is smart, reserved, fiercely loyal to her friends, logical and beautiful too. She is planning to teach High School English, so she's brave too!

 3) My friend Audrey - Frances from Under the Tuscan Sun - Strong, single, impulsive, capable, quick to laughter and always ready for an adventure!

 4) My friend Sara - Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird She's a "Hey, Boo" kinda girl. And not prone to understand deliberate ignorance. She doesn't judge and doesn't hold to prescribed norms. She knows not only good from bad, but fights for it too. And fights well! After all she IS a lawyer.

5) My friend Jody - Erin Brockovich - Ok so technically Erin is real and not from a book even, but seriously Jody can kick some butt, rock some heels, and do the job better than anyone with 3 times the education!! And you DEFINITELY want her on your side.

 6) My Dad - Mr. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice - He just wanted to see me happy doing what I wanted to do as long as it wasn't tooooo out there and he'd defy who he needed to to make it happen. He wasn't the interfering type and went about his own business but was there for me with advice if I needed it. And he'd come get me if I was in trouble too.

7)  My Mom - the Mom from I Love You Forever - She would never fail to tell me she loved me. She worked her whole life FOR me. And now the tables are beginning to turn as she gets older and I get to tell her how much I love her  too :)

8)  My friend and co-worker Kayla - Ruby Thewes from Cold Mountain - She's tough as nails and can do just anything. She'd put a floggin' rooster in a pot in a hurry! She's smart past her cirucmstances too and a hard worker whose had to stand on her own early in her life

9) ???? (I'm not quite ready to say his name in case he's not as ready as I am)  - Noah from the Notebook - I hope I'm not saying this too prematurely but it's weird how close it all is. He's handsome, and independent, we were together once then apart (my fault) then there were others in the picture who kept us apart by manipulation and we never got a fair shot at this craziness called relationship. Now we are back together and it was practically a "it's still not over" moment. Hell it still might be!!! >:)

10) Me - so that makes me Allie. I've got a temper. I'm feisty and go against the norm sometimes, I wish I came from as much money. But I've not  know too much poverty. I know my faults in my past and I know the future is up to my choices.  I don't paint, but I do blog!!

Top Ten Quotes ~ subject to change without notice

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish

This week's topic is:  Top Ten Favorite Passages from Books

This is a fun topic this week! It is also one that, like my favorite food, tends to change depending on, for one thing, what new book I've read or what strikes my fancy, or what I remember I've forgotten!! There are so many that I'm sure as I go through the linky list, I'll be face-palm-ing for not choosing more amazing quotes!

 “You must never feel badly about making mistakes ... as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth 

  “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.(Miss Maudie)”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

 “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods 

 “I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring 

'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring   

 “I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska 

  “They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain 
(actually I like to recite this one just like in the movie. and I'm good at it too! I really get into it! watch out Renee!!)

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice  

 “But the wild things cried, “Oh please don't go- We'll eat you up- we love you so!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are 

Farewell Maurice.

It's Monday May 7th

This is my first participation in this meme although I have been lurking and reading IMWAYR posts from you all for quite some time :) I read so slow though (due to time, not because I'm bad at it), that I have felt that my posts would be quite redundant.

But maybe not, so I thought I'd give it a go :)

This week I finished:

I started this as an Audiobook and finished up with the print version. I didn't care for the audio at all. I did enjoy the print but was a bit "Meh" on the ending.



I am currently reading: 

This takes a brain shift after Mockingjay. I am enjoying it but having a devil of a time remembering who is who!! And soooo trying to keep the movie out of my imagination as I read. I'm not far into it yet. I may have to make notes! ;)

Also

I've been dying to read this! It is laugh-out-loud funny but not exactly what I expected. I can't wait to get back to it each afternoon! I'm a little over half done I think.

This is the first time I've used the free Kindle reading app with a loan from our public library. This is purty slick!!


And

I started this as a galley but dropped the ball and didn't get it done... so I went and bought it and am finishing it. :) Hope to get back to it again pretty soon, I'm neglecting it again and not because I don't like it, I actually LOVE it!! Mostly because I don't think of myself as much of a cook and it's nice when I see other people struggle with food and win too!

Coming up:

and a WHOLE lot of other choices

Bookish things to do this week:

I've applied for a position on the local Library Board of Directors. There is a meeting on Wednesday and I hope to crash it since I don't think the position has been assigned yet.

I hope they want me!! :)

Sunday Screening and Contemplations

In the midst of the extremely busy month I took a few hours today and took my girls to the mall. Big mistake since I WAS trying to save some money...I just can't help myself when it comes to getting things for them.

I also got a very very brief stroll through the Barnes & Nobel store and realized how much I would love to completely immerse myself in the book world. I wanted to read everything I saw! All of them on the best-seller shelf,  from the new releases display, from the 3 for 19.00 or what ever it was, from the inspirational endcap. And I got a bit sad that I can only read so fast. And that I didn't have time to properly narrow down my choices and guiltily left without anything. Except its partially ok because I have a trip planned to an indie soon.

Which also got me thinking about how far I have to go for books. Which again made me sad.

So when I got home i decided to wallow for a bit longer and watch my netflix movie. It's not a new release, actually it's almost a year old, but I hadn't seen it yet. The movie was Super 8.

And I loved it!!! It was so much 'Friday Night Creature Feature' FUN!!!!  If you haven't seen here's the imdb synopsis:
In the summer of 1979, a group of friends in a small Ohio town witness a catastrophic train crash while making a super 8 movie and soon suspect that it was not an accident. Shortly after, unusual disappearances and inexplicable events begin to take place in town, and the local Deputy tries to uncover the truth - something more terrifying than any of them could have imagined.

It was eerie and mysterious and creepy and jump-out-and-go-boo scary, the kids were amazing and the grown-ups were perfectly adultly oblivious but stepped up to the plate like adults should.

The time frame of the suburban 70's was so perfect for me because that's when I was watching movies like this. Or sort of like this, if Godzilla vs Mothra is sort of like this. And I was totally happy!! But it was done by Spielberg and well, that means it had to have some greatness to it!

As I was watching my mind kept sneaking off to a little world called The Billionaires Bookshop. Its a little place where I pretend I have so much money that  Profit and Loss statements hardly matter and I can focus on just making a place in my little town where bookish folk can come together.  I keep coming up with fun ideas...like a monster movie night. And then a brainstorming session on what would be a great read to continue the theme... I'd start it off with...
Under the Dome.. and let the ideas go from there. (which by the way, have Spielberg and King ever teamed up? Pardon me while I run over to google for a moment .... according to the illustrious information on the interwebs.. survey says.... Not Yet...but guess what... they are working together on ....(dramatic music: buhm buhm buhm) Under the Dome.)

Which was just a little trippy! Anyway....

And so on....wouldn't it be great to have a place like that here in town? Wouldn't it?  35 miles or so to the closest bookstore and none of them have a full fledged book culture. And I wouldn't get to enjoy much of it anyway because, well I'm 35 FRICKEN miles away.

I wonder if I should maybe take a job down at B&N to see what this book biz is all about. hmmmm? Maybe prepare myself with a little on-the-job training? Because if the Billionaires Bookshop ever actually came into being it would be suuuuuch a cool place I just KNOW it! :)

Mini-review: Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins

I call this a mini review because this series has been so reviewed of late that there is probably not much I can add to the discussion at this point.

If you love the series you love it, if you're luke-warm on it there probably wont be anything that will increase your opinion.

So I've nothing left but to give my opinion on not only the third book, but the series.

My Rating:  3.5/5

Of course this book is on the waiting list still at the local library but I was anxious to finish the series so I opted for the audio book, which had no wait at all.

For me this was a big mistake. The narrator, Carolyn McCormick, didn't seem to have the same opinion of Katniss, et al. She leaned more to the 'young' in Young Adult than I had in my mind. So I was about 2/3 done when my name came up on the waiting list and I was super glad to swap them out and get Katniss back in my head where she took on more of her BA self I'd attributed to her.

Which brings me to my second opinion of this particular book in the series. While the premise of the Hunger Games was hard enough for the mother of daughters to take, the ending (minor spoiler alert!)





weather due to politics, mistake or deliberate act of war was doubly hard to take. That jolt aside, I think I felt the rest was a bit, actually, anti-climatic. Which definitely surprised me.

As for the series? I'm thinking one tightly written book may have actually done it, but on the cynical side would never have generated as much revenue (by, oh say, 1/3?).

All my moaning and complaining aside, do you know what? I actually really liked this series!! I know! By all rights I should say, oh no I didn't care for that. But it was fun! It was haunted house type of fun, you know it's not great and you know where all the tricks are, but you go anyway and scream and laugh and have a good time.

And you know what else? Sometimes there's absolutely nothing wrong with that! ;)

Laura

eReader envy?

So I may be coming to this discussion a little late, but for those of you out there who have been lurking as well, jump right on in with me.

I want an eReader.

Why? I have no EARTHLY idea!! I tend to buy second hand books or from Idies as often as I can get near them, so having an eReader and tying myself to the big boys of Amazon and Barnes & Noble seems a bit anti-indie to me.

Yet I want an eReader

Which is SILLY!! Because..... I recently downloaded the Kindle Reader App for my laptop and now can read any ebook in the world (basically) on my nice Mac screen. And not only that, I can down load a book and store it on my Amazon Cloud (my free Amazon Cloud) and pick up where I left off no matter where I am. My computer at work has the reader app, my laptop has the reader app. The computer at my dad's house has the reader app. My library goes with me everywhere. And to keep things fair and balanced, Nook has the same app. And with my app I can check out eBooks from the library too, so I"m not 100% saddled to lining the pockets (directly) at the giants of the digital media world.

Yet I want an eReader

So what's wrong with me? I mean technically I HAVE an eReader!

Am I just so commercialized that I'm addicted to the getting? To the having and holding? Am I suffering from eReader-Envy? Am I addicted to the receipt collection that's taking over my desk and the darkest recesses of my purse? It's more than just that kindles and Nooks are easier to hold. I have my laptop with me most of the time anyway. So it has to be a gadget-mania symptom of some kind.

Something like that least. The only legitimate rationalization I can come up with is I want to know how to use it (and even some of the apps that come with it) so I don't fall behind the learning curve. I do fear that. Especially <whisper> at my age </whisper>

One of these days I'm sure I'll cave. Until then I do enjoy the benefits these apps are allowing me.

What about you? Did you pick a reader? Did it take like forever for you to figure out which one you wanted? Did you try the PC/MAC apps at all?

It's a lot to consider on a Monday! Must be the weather.

Laura

Expensive reading!!

  http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/reading-royals-fan-displays-just-one-way-cope-223407810.html

I understand the seat our biblio-dedicated fan is reading in goes for upwards of $240 bucks! Maybe we'd have to know his family to know weather or not this was a bargin!

ANNNNND
Afterall....

It was WORLD BOOK NIGHT!! :)

I say Atta Boy!